


The Room at the Back of the House

by nightabsentia



Category: Metallica
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, Philosophy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-22
Updated: 2021-01-22
Packaged: 2021-03-13 19:49:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28908855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightabsentia/pseuds/nightabsentia
Summary: Invited for a stay at the Burton household, Jason finds Cliff's old bedroom.Death tends to be an abstraction for the living. Until we remember what is real. What is material.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 17





	The Room at the Back of the House

**Author's Note:**

> a totally unedited drabble from an idea me and the girls cried over. ray and jan loved jason so much, and i like to think they invited him over alot on breaks and such. set around about '88. 
> 
> huge shoutout to pinkmaggit for alot of the inspo for lines and ideas here. she practically ghostwrote this.

The door squeaks heavily upon the hinges when Jason pushes it open. It’s late at night, and Ray and Jan are asleep, but he knows that they wouldn’t mind anyway. 

Ray mentioned it to him when Jason first arrived. Ray actually wanted to put him in that room, have him sleep in the bed, but Jason insisted that he couldn’t, and that the couch would be good enough. It had hardly been his intention to go in at all. 

Except that he sees the room cracked open as he was passing from the bathroom, and it occurs to him that there’s nothing stopping him from going in. His heart clenches up in his chest, and his guts work themselves into knots as he weighs this decision, but he’s far too curious to stop himself now. 

So he enters. 

Jason’s hand runs along the edge of the doorjamb on the wall until he finds a switch and flicks it on. And the room is illuminated.

It’s a room, much like every other. Untidied and disorganized, as though the occupant could come home any second. It looks like his room that he left behind at his own parents’ house in Michigan. Like the rooms of friends he visited in high school. Unmistakably belonging to a young man. A plain room, at the back of the house, remarkably unremarkable. Except he knows whose it is. And that’s what makes the difference.

The first thing he sees is the posters of all sorts lining the walls. Lynyrd Skynyrd. Kiss. Blue Oyster Cult. Deep Purple. Motorhead. He’s pretty sure that he had a couple of the same ones that he gave to the Flotsam guys when he ditched Phoenix. A smile tugs on the edge of his lips. There’s Metallica posters too. From gigs they did years ago, as opening acts or in festival lineups, telling those who see it when, where, and for how much. And in the dead space between posters, there are thumbtacked scraps of newspaper clippings, talking about the local Bay Area breakouts and their goings on. Jason knows Jan reads the paper in the mornings; whether she clipped them or Cliff did, Jason’s not sure. 

Like in a museum, he takes the time to stop and look at each individual exhibit, working his way around. On top of the dresser, he finds strewn about coins and dollar bills, a couple empty pill bottles, an open pack of gum, a pair of glasses with one of the frames punched out. 

There’s a stack of comic books, too; Jason’s never been much into comics, so he isn’t familiar with the title of the horror serial he flips through. It looks a lot like something Kirk would read. Maybe it _is_ Kirk’s. Maybe Cliff never got a chance to give it back. He sets it back down. 

His desk is in much the same disarray. Cassette tapes and pens and pencils and tattered wire bound notebooks, a desk lamp with a rosary draped over the shade. He picks up one of the many cassettes: Rush, _2112_. It’s one of Jason’s favorites, funnily enough. 

On the very edge of the desk, right next to the bed, where Cliff might’ve set them before going to sleep, are two paperback books there as well. They’re both Bradbury, and hey, Jason likes him too. Opening to a random page in _Fahrenheit 451,_ he sees that a lot of it is underlined, highlighted, with notes in the margins. He flips to a page, and one of the lines Cliff must’ve thought was important was, _‘The three women turned slowly and looked with unconcealed irritation and then dislike at Montag.’_ He’s not close with anybody else that likes Bradbury, and it pains him that another person who would get it isn’t here to talk about it with him. A missed connection. 

Ray said once that he knew that Cliff and Jason would’ve gotten along famously. Jason wondered how true that was when he said it, but maybe there is something to it after all, cause Jason thinks that maybe he would’ve liked Cliff. 

Jason never did meet Cliff. He met Lars a few times, but not Cliff. He saw him, when Metallica was last in Phoenix in ‘86. That must’ve been in May sometime that year. He showed up early so he could get barricade, and waited for hours and hours and hours, chatting casually with the people that huddled around him, until the show started. And he put himself on the side that he heard Cliff would be at, and he was. Cliff was a flurry in auburn hair and blue denim. At some points Jason forgot he should be enjoying the music because he was so focused in on Cliff’s hands as they worked over the strings and up and down the fretboard. Jason remembers how he wished that he could play like him someday, that the Flotsam guys could be like Metallica someday. 

The bed is made. Jason runs his hand over the flannel sheets, but it does not once cross his mind to sit or lie on the bed. Instead, he sits on the floor next to the bed, and leans back until he’s lying down. Under the bed, tucked close to the desk, he sees a skateboard and a couple of Playboy magazines. That gets a soft laugh out of him as he turns to look at the ceiling. There’s a Black Sabbath poster pinned up onto it, and how funny, Jason didn’t notice that before. He stares up at it, traces the letters of the text, observes the rip in the top left corner. Jason wonders how often Cliff did the same thing. 

He closes his eyes. 

This room, which is so much more than just a room in a San Francisco suburb. It commands the respect and reverence you would offer in a cemetery. After all, what is all this stuff otherwise, than the bones of a man who is no longer here? A skeleton made out of the people that love him, the things he loved, the memories everyone has to share of him. And what is Jason, other than a mourner who has come to pay his respects to the man whose fate brought about his destiny? The man whose death changed Jason’s life. 

Jason knew what he was coming into. He was only in Metallica because somebody else was dead. Though death tends to be an abstraction for the living; hearing about disasters and accidents and disease and forgetting that there’s more than a loss of life. Until we remember what is real. What is material. Being here, in this room – Jason understands how achingly and utterly _human_ Cliff was. 

Conceptualizing him deeper as a person in what remains in this room, Cliff, who had thoughts and interests and fucking _lived,_ really really _lived_ and was not an abstraction but real flesh and blood – Cliff is so very much alive if not in breath and a heartbeat. And people do not die as long as these things remain. 

On the dingy old carpet in the room in the back of the house, Jason swears to himself that he won’t allow this understanding of Cliff to ever slip away from him. For as long as he is in the position Cliff should be, he will be remembered. And Jason’s going to live, and feel, and do, because he’s doing so in place of someone who can’t anymore. 

Jason turns on his side. In the silence that surrounds him, his ears are ringing.

His ears are ringing.


End file.
